Then the Great American Ass read it. All Iowa borrowed it from circulating libraries. Oklahoma read it. And finally Nebraska placed upon it the official chaplet of literary success. Finally everybody read it--everybody from uplifter to shoplifter. And it became a best-seller in rivalry with the exudations of the favourite female writer of the Centre of Population--a noisy and bad-tempered woman whose only merit was that she unwittingly furnished scientific minds with material for healthy laughter. Thus the first novel of Barry Annan, purposely un-serialised as a _ballon d’essai_, ascended to the skies like the fat, bourgeois and severed soul of Louis XVI, amid a roll of revolutionary drums. The unusual aspect of the case was that, technically, the book was nearly perfect; the style admirable and with scarce a flaw. Now the Great American Ass understands nothing of literary workmanship. Style means nothing to him. Yet he bolted Annan’s book and seemed to enjoy the flavour. _Seemed_ to. For one never can know anything definite about an ass. * * * * * From the Pacific coast Betsy Blythe wrote Annan. She had read the novel. That, ostensibly, was her theme. She applauded his fame, expressed herself as proud to be numbered among the friends of such a celebrity. Then there was some gossip about herself, the company,--inquiry as to how he had liked the pictures which she assumed he had seen in the East. Then there was a paragraph: “What are you doing to our Eris, Barry? I suppose it’s what you did to me, to Rosalind, to every fresh and attractive face which possessed ears to listen to your golden vocabulary. Still, I don’t see how you had time: you saw her only that one afternoon in the projection room, she tells me. “But I suppose you’re as deadly by letter as otherwise. Like measles I suppose we all have got to have you. Eris had it harder, that’s all. “But I’m going to tell you that when she recovers,--as we all do,--you’ll be surprised at the charming creature she is turning into. “I honestly think she is the most intelligent girl I ever knew. She not only _looks_ but she sees. She learns like lightning. The odd thing about her is the decided quality in her. Her mind is the mind of a gentlewoman. As for the externals--trick of voice and speech and bearing, it scarcely seems as though she acquired them. Rather they seem to have been latent in her, and have merely developed. “Yet she tells me she is the daughter of very plain people. “Well, Eris, in her way, is already a celebrity on the Coast. She has become quite the loveliest to look at out here. And she is a natural actress. There, my friend! Am I generous? “Alas, Barry, she worries me. I like her, admire her, but--it seems ignoble in me--I can’t stand the competition. We can’t go on together. She’s too pretty and too clever. It seems impossible to bury her under any part, no matter how rotten.